I just spent the last I don’t know how long playing my guitar which was both wonderful and somewhat numbing of the sensitivity of the fingertips on my left hand. Oh, and time-consuming.

In other news, today was a bit of a waste. I had all these plans and achieved very few of them, mostly because I didn’t feel well (bladder) and because none of you assholes bought me a dehydrator.

Oops.

I didn’t mean to use such course language.

And I am just kidding and over it. Clearly I need to just put energy into things that generate income, and that’s fine. In fact, it’s good to clarify which end is up sometimes…and I can also ensure you that my new $12.99 flip phone is not on the list either.

What’s that you say?

Didn’t you plunk down hundreds on an iPhone?

Oh. Yes. I did. I thought it would revolutionize my life and make me dinner and organize my closet and help to facilitate this plan to blog every day with fun or entertaining photos…but then the first one died about 16 hours after I got it, and the second one went bad before I even got home, and the third one – wait for it – was also a total lemon out of the box, although its problem was sporadic, so I couldn’t prove it until it croaked completely on Sunday night.

My timing couldn’t be better: there are no more iPhone 4 models in stock (which is fine because I wouldn’t take one anyway), and the new iPhone 4S is sold out for two to three weeks, so I am (not so) patiently waiting with a $12.99 special I picked up at Radio Shack. I’m texting like it’s 1999. Do you know how much work it is to text the message “I can’t text right now. This phone is a piece of shit.” on an old school phone? j-k-I space a-b-c, a, m-n, weird key that has all the punctuation.

I had literally forgotten how to text this way. I had to write the same response to my landlord seven times because I couldn’t figure out how to delete and didn’t want to send something with misspellings. As usual, he was being a bipolar dick, but I at least want my own feedback to be literate: might help with the judge when we one day end up in court.

And me without a dehydrator…

I so regret cutting my hair. I found a picture of me when it was much longer the other day…and it was so pretty. But that’s okay. It’s hair. It grows. It’s growing. I do wish I could put six inches on it like magic, but I will do my best to enjoy the intermediate lengths in between even though I feel more like I am enduring a short curly phase that makes me feel like Shirley Temple.

These are the days of my life.

Tomorrow will be better.

I’ve purchased a white board and will start focusing my thoughts…and efforts.
I am a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. Whether or not it is clear to me, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

You know it as a dangerous winter driving condition, but it turns out black ice is also a scent! Imagine cruising down the highway and then suddenly careening out of control on black ice while simultaneously your nostrils feast on the undefinable but probably vaguely pineapple-ish scent of black ice: bliss.

I wonder if this is some goof they ship to Hawaii figuring nobody here is any the wiser? I swear this place is like a foreign country sometimes. Let’s call it Meximerica.

The dog and I did the usual: pose for self-photos. This is our Sears Portrait Studio moment.

This is our “love is eternal” shot.

Then I made some pesto out of this homegrown basil this lady gave me. Since we’re in blow by blow mode and this post is rapidly coming to its conclusion, feast your eyes on both the before:

And the finished product, which I haven’t yet eaten, so I suppose I’ll go boil some pasta and get that show on the road…

Welcome to day twelve of my “surely this has been manufactured in some kind of cold war lab” sinus-suffocating illness. I have been ridiculously sick since the day after Thanksgiving. I don’t know who did this to me, but I have my suspects, and I plan to name names below. In other news, did you know a human being can produce over five pounds of snot, phlegm, and mucus a day? Trust me on this: I am walking proof.

In short, my absence has been mostly unpleasant, semi-worthless from a productivity standpoint, and physically draining, but I will focus on the positive as much as possible. For instance, coughing your lungs up seventy-five times an hour doubles as a pretty amazing abdominal workout! Moreover, for the last few days I’ve had the perfect voice to pull off a mean version of Bette Davis Eyes.

So let’s start at the beginning: Thanksgiving.

It was fine. It was what it was: a holiday centered around cooking one giant meal which is over very quickly and kind of pointless. I made the turkey and my friend’s family took care of the rest. All in all, it was uneventful minus the presence of three little kids, one of whom was taken to the emergency room later that night due to his cranky mood, low fever, and obvious head cold.

Another random image. Somersault-ish, no?

When my sore throat started the following night, and as an experienced Clue player, I immediately fingered one-year-old Blake, in the libary, with the candlestick as the Typhoid Mary of our turkey celebration. However, a follow up inquiry revealed that he has the croup. Seeing as that’s a childhood illness, I suppose I can’t really blame him. Thus, reluctantly, he’s off the hook.

The oldest child, a six-year old girl named Athena, appeared healthy, although she suffered from apparent mental problems. This wasn’t immediately obvious, but the damning evidence emerged shortly after she learned my age. Thinking thoughtfully for a moment, she exclaimed, “My mom’s almost your age! She’s twenty-six.”

I know what you’re thinking: that’s not crazy talk. The child is young. And bad at math. All adults are old to little kids. Once you get over twenty, you’re old. Hell, I remember being in first grade (this little girl’s age) and thinking the eighth graders were as old as my parents. Plus, if you brought them your impossibly scrambled up Rubik’s cube, they would fix it for you, something that bordered on the miraculous in my eyes.

Brief digression: remember how there was a formula that once you got a line of color or a few squares next to each other, you could fix a Rubik’s cube: reset it back to the beginning? My dad even bought the book on how to do it, although I didn’t possess the patience to get through all the steps. I do, however, have a clear memory of my even more impatient brother pulling the actual cubes off the frame and trying to reassemble it in some semblance of order. It didn’t work. Stickers were removed. Things digressed from there.

Final random image. I do it for you. Because I know you like pictures.

I am, as you know and to my own horror, closer to forty than thirty, but since she’s chosen to hear me wrong or remember it wrong, I couldn’t quite see the point to straightening her out. Thirty’s bad enough, and…wait…what did she just say? I look younger than someone twenty-six? Well, bless her little crazy heart.

And she didn’t stop there. When I thanked her for the compliment, she followed up that not only did I not look thirty…or twenty-six…but sixteen.

Yep.

According to a six-year old, I look sixteen. Thus my earlier suggestion that the child had a mental illness, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Admittedly, I was feeling pretty youthful and vibrant and youthful and vibrant-looking at that point, and I now think that’s how the con works. “Let’s have a dance off!” she proposed. I somehow weasled out. THANK GOD.

Fair enough.

“Look at this!” She executed a cartwheel on the living room rug, and I was appropriately congratulatory.

“Now you do it!”

“I can’t. The only thing I can do is a somersault.”

“Do it!”

I am 99% sure that the last time I did a somersault I was in high school, and I vaguely recall it as an unpleasant experience that received a poor grade, but before I could analyze the situation too much, I found myself attempting one.

It was harder than I would have thought.

It took about three false starts before I got the momentum to actually go over.

It was around that time that I realized that whether or not I look sixteen or twenty-six or sixty, I am too damn old for somersaulting on the living room floor. Attempts to cajole me into further performances (including proclamations that I do somersaults better than anyone she’s ever seen or that I MUST do it again so that the grown-ups could appreciate my gymnastic talents) failed as I wondered if they kept a neck brace or cervical collar around just in case.

It took about 36 hours before my neck felt right again.

As for my bird/swine/cockroach/space alien flu infection, there was a third suspect present: a three-year old with a third unusual name that I kept forgetting and can’t remember now. Cortland? Copeland? Coleman? Carlson? I don’t know. Anyway, he was sick too. Coughing and snotty and all over the place. And he brought me several empty Dixie Cups. And burst in on me in the bathroom after an intense screaming beat down on the door (in hindsight, a warning I should have heeded). And he hit me with the lid to the garbage can. And somehow made me incredibly, horribly, never-endingly sick.

Was it his fault for sure?

I don’t know, but in my court, you’re guilty until proven innocent and therefore Colton (I actually think the name was Colton) is to blame.

(Assuming I survive the night, more tomorrow on my ‘adventures’ from days three through six…)

Thus, it’s a given that I would get all smooshy over the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” and now Bruno Mars’ completely unrelated, but identically named “Just the Way You Are Are” for entirely different, yet similarly pathetic reasons.

Immature love:

“And when you smile, the whole world stops and stares for awhile

Cause girl you’re amazing just the way you are.”

Versus seemingly more mature love, yet probably equally doomed love:

“I wouldn’t leave you in times of trouble

We never could have come this far

I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times

I’ll take you just the way you are.”

If there really is such a thing as love, I vote for the latter. Personally, I’d rather be loved for being me than for the way my nails are painted. But hey…

In other news, I really labored over the title of this post and thus, directly or unintenttionally or some such thing, drug out its eventual publication. I started with “A stitch in time saves nine” but that has nothing to do with anything. Then I went to the pun “Sew adorable”…but I hate puns. I won’t bore you with the iterations in between except to say that they were so bad that I was relieved to be moved by the dumbass scenario above, and thus conjure my final main subject matter and related title.

Nonetheless, and in conclusion, and in other news, I need someone to make me a dress. I have a good friend who makes clothes and sells them on Etsy (you know who you are), and I may have to call you out literally (or just pick up the phone and call you) because I WANT THIS DRESS.

I want the one on the left with the turquoise top. LOVE.

Not this short, necessarily, and definitely not with the strange hairdo, but otherwise: exactly.

I actually want this dress enough that I have vaguely considered pulling out my own sewing machine and ruining several pieces of cheap jersey until I figure out how to make this. And that’s scary talk, because (minus a period where I made hats and sold them at Grateful Dead concerts: don’t ask) I don’t really know how to sew.

I wish I did.

I LOVE clothes.

And I love to save money.

And I love variety.

And I could combine all three passions into one happy experience if I knew how to sew, but it’s not exactly like (searching in my mind something simple that anyone can just pick up and do expertly. Ummmm….) chewing gum. You need some schooling and some skill and some inside tips and tricks or it ends up looking like something you made yourself, which is never good. I remember when I was a little girl we made a wrap skirt in Girl Scouts and for some reason I had this hideous dark green wool material (compared with denims and flowered cottons brought by the other girls) and although the skirt worked out, it was butt ugly and (in my opinion) looked homemade. It also had a bad habit of coming open in a most unladylike way, which was probably my guardian angel’s attempt to prevent me from wearing it in public.

As if the green wool wasn’t enough.

Too bad it wasn’t…. (coming open either…)

Thinking of going with the curl instead of fighting it.

In other news, as long as I’m sharing boring things, I have a haircut Monday, and I’m thinking about giving in and going with the curl. And sticking with a more natural color (i.e. kind of like her color). Admittedly, I won’t be able to pull it back or put it into a ponytail or wear it the way it currently is 99% of the time, but I also do that because I’m not super thrilled with it right now anyway.

So there you go: I love this dress and I may cut my hair shorter still.

Think you're so smart?
Maybe you're tired of all the technological issues, and want to take over and reduce the number of heart attacks I have per week?
Send a note to the Webmaster, Dozer! (And if you don't hear back, no doubt it's because he has trouble using the keyboard.)